Caspar David Friedrich and the Subject of Landscape

Caspar David Friedrich (1774-1840), the greatest painter of the Romantic movement in Germany, was perhaps Europe’s first truly modern artist. His melancholy landscapes, often peopled by lonely wanderers, represent experiments towards a radically subjective art, one in which, as Friedrich wrote, the painter depicts not ‘what he sees before him, but what he sees within him’. Yet in their awesome power to capture the individuality of visible forms Friedrich’s pictures also accept and express the irredeemable otherness of Nature. In this compelling and highly original book, winner of the 1992 Mitchell Prize for the History of Art, now made available in a compact pocket format, Joseph Leo Koerner analyses Friedrich’s art as it emerges out of – and partly reorientates – a subjectivist aesthetic. Beautifully illustrated, “Caspar David Friedrich and the Subject of Landscape” is the most comprehensive account ever published in English on this most fascinating of nineteenth-century masters.

Accolades Winner of Mitchell Prize for the History of Art 1992. Author Biography Joseph Leo Koerner is Professor of Art History at University College London. His books include ‘The Moment of Self-Portraiture in German Renaissance Art’ (1993) and ‘Reformation of the Image’ (Reaktion Books and University of Chicago Press, 2004). In 1995 he was elected a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Science.

Author Biography

Joseph Leo Koerner is Victor S. Thomas Professor of History of Art and Architecture at Harvard University. His books include The Moment of Self-Portraiture in German Renaissance Art (1993), Caspar David Friedrich and the Subject of Landscape (Reaktion, 1st edn 1993, 2nd edn 2009) and Reformation of the Image (Reaktion, 2004).